ọdịnaya
Junior schoolchildren are children aged 7 to 9 years, that is, from the 1st to the 3rd (4th) grades of the school. List of literature for grade 3 — download.
The child becomes a schoolboy, which means that he now has new duties, new rules and new rights. He can claim serious attitude on the part of adults to his educational work; he has the right to his workplace, to the time necessary for his studies, to teaching aids, etc. On the other hand, he faces new development tasks, primarily the task of developing diligence skills, being able to decompose a complex task into components, being able to see the connection between efforts and the achieved result, to be able to accept the challenge of situations with determination and courage, to be able to adequately assess oneself, to be able to respect the boundaries — one’s own and those of others.
Hard work skills
Since the primary goal of an elementary school student is to “learn how to learn,” self-esteem is built on the basis of academic success. If everything is good in this area, diligence (industriousness) becomes part of the child’s personality. Conversely, underachieving children may feel inferior compared to more successful peers. Later, this can develop into a habit of constantly evaluating yourself and others, and can affect your ability to complete what you start.
Break down a complex problem into components
When faced with a complex and new task, it is important to be able to see it as a sequence of separate, smaller and more feasible tasks (steps or levels). We teach children to decompose a complex task into components, teaching them to design, plan their activities. It is impossible to immediately eat an orange — it is inconvenient and even dangerous: you can choke on putting too much of a piece in your mouth. However, if you divide an orange into slices, then you can eat it without stress and with pleasure.
We often see in a group of children who do not have this skill. The most illustrative picture is a tea party, which the guys organize themselves. In order to get a good result (a table on which there is a sweet treat in plates, where there is no garbage and packaging, where everyone has a drink and a place at the table), the guys have to make an effort. At the beginning of the school year, we see a variety of options: it’s hard to stop and not try something tasty from someone else’s plate, it’s hard to remember about your things that need to be put away with the start of tea drinking, and even cleaning up crumbs is a task of increased complexity. However, if you divide the big deal — organizing a tea party — into small feasible tasks, then a group of children aged 7-9 years old can easily cope with this on their own. Of course, the facilitators remain in the group and are ready to regulate the process if necessary.
See the connection between effort and achievement
When a child takes responsibility, he thereby begins the process of transforming the future. What does it mean? The assignments that the guys take on, of course, create some difficulties in their lives (you need to wipe the board in time, not miss a day of your duty, etc.), but, seeing the result of their work, the child begins to understand: “I can!” .
Position of the Author: the habit of accepting the challenge of situations with determination and courage
When we say: “It would be nice if the child learned or got used to doing something”, we mean only his abilities. In order for a child to change the concept of “I won’t even try, it still won’t work out” to a healthy “thirst for achievement”, it is necessary to make risk, courage and overcoming the values of children.
The position of the Victim, the passive personal position, the fear of failure, the feeling that it is pointless to try and try — these are the most unpleasant consequences that ignoring this personal task can lead to. Here, as in the previous paragraph, we are also talking about experiencing about my own strength, energy, but my gaze is turned to the situation, to what comes from the world as a task: in order to act, I must take a chance, try; if I’m not ready to take risks, I stop acting.
Alexey, 7 years old. Mom turned to us with complaints about her son’s insecurity and shyness, which prevent him from studying. Indeed, Alexei is a very quiet boy, if you don’t ask him, he is silent, at the training he is afraid to speak out in a circle. It is difficult for him when the actions that the hosts offer relate to feelings and experiences, it is difficult to be open in the group, in the presence of other guys. Alexey’s problem — the anxiety that he experiences — does not allow him to be active, blocks him. Faced with difficulties, he immediately retreats. Willingness to take risks, energy, courage — this is what he lacks to be sure. In the group, we and the rest of the guys often supported him, and after a while Aleksey became more calm and confident, he made friends among the boys, and at one of the last classes he, pretending to be a partisan, ran with a toy machine gun, which for him is undoubted success.
Here are examples of how to teach children to react to troubles in an adult way.
Evaluate yourself appropriately
In order for a child to form a healthy attitude towards the process of evaluating himself, it is important that he himself learns to understand How long effort he spent on a task, and also to evaluate himself in accordance with the number of efforts, and not with an assessment from outside. This task is complex, and it consists of at least three components such as:
- gain experience of diligence — that is, independently do such things that must be done under any conditions and which involve overcoming “I don’t want to”;
- learn to determine the amount of effort expended — that is, be able to separate your contribution from the contribution of circumstances and other people;
- learn to find correspondences between this amount of effort expended, attitude towards oneself and the result. The main difficulty lies in the fact that this natural work is opposed by external evaluation from significant persons, which is based on other grounds, namely, on comparison with the results of other children.
With insufficient formation of this task of personal development, the child, instead of the ability to focus on himself, falls into an «adaptive trance», devoting all his strength to obtaining assessments. According to external assessments, he evaluates himself, losing the ability to form internal criteria. Students who catch the slightest change in the teacher’s face when trying to «read» the correct answer «beg» for higher marks and prefer to lie rather than admit to a mistake.
There were such children in our group, and more than once. A very typical image is a girl or a boy, with whom there are no problems in the group, who exactly follow all the rules and instructions, but they do not have any internal development. Time after time, such a child comes to class, and each time demonstrates that he is perfectly able to read our requirements, can easily adapt to any situation in order to please the leaders, will make comments to the rest of the guys, which will cause aggression. Friends on the group, of course, does not appear. The child is outward-oriented, so any question related to experience or one’s own opinion is “What do you think? And how is it for you? And what do you feel now? ”- puts him to a standstill. A characteristic bewildered expression immediately appears on the face and, as it were, the question: “How is it right? What do I need to answer in order to be praised?
What do these children need? Learn to think with your head, to speak your mind.
Respect boundaries — your own and those of others
The child learns to find such a children’s group in which his characteristics would be respected, he himself learns tolerance. He learns to refuse, learns to spend time with himself: for many children this is a special, very difficult task — to calmly endure situations of forced loneliness. It is important to teach the child to voluntarily and willingly join various collective projects, to develop his sociability, the ability to easily include other children in group activities. It is equally important to teach him not to do this at any cost, that is, to teach him to refuse a game or a company if his boundaries are violated, his rights are violated, his dignity is humiliated.
This is the kind of problem that occurs in children who appear lonely. Shy, cautious or, conversely, aggressive, that is, children who are rejected by their peers have the same personality deficit. They do not feel the boundaries of «their own» (their needs, values, desires), their «I» is not clearly defined. That is why they easily allow other children to violate their boundaries or become sticky, that is, they constantly need someone nearby in order not to feel like an empty place. These children easily violate the boundaries of others, since the lack of a sense of the boundaries of another’s and one’s own are interdependent processes.
Serezha, 9 years old. His parents brought him to the training due to problems with classmates: Serezha had no friends. Although he is a sociable boy, he has no friends, he is not respected in the class. Serezha makes a very pleasant impression, it is easy to communicate with him, he is actively involved in the training process, gets to know new guys. Difficulties begin when the lesson begins. Serezha tries so hard to please everyone, he needs constant attention from other guys so much that for this he is ready to do anything: he constantly jokes, often inappropriately and sometimes indecently, comments on every statement in a circle, exposes himself in a stupid light, so that everyone the rest noticed him. After a few lessons, the guys begin to react aggressively to him, come up with the nickname «Petrosyan» for him. Friendships in a group do not add up, just like with classmates. We began to draw Serezha’s attention to his behavior in the group, telling him how his actions affect the rest of the guys. We supported him, stopped the aggressive reactions of the group, suggested that the rest of the participants not support this image of «Petrosyan». After some time, Serezha began to attract less attention in the group, began to respect himself and others more. He still jokes a lot, but now it does not cause an aggressive reaction from the rest of the group, since with his jokes he does not offend the others and does not humiliate himself. Serezha made friends in the class and in the group.
Natasha. 9 years. Appeal at the initiative of the parents: the girl is offended in the classroom, according to her — for no reason. Natasha is charming, cheerful, easy to communicate with the guys. At the first lesson, we did not understand what the problem might be. But at one of the classes, Natasha suddenly speaks aggressively and offensively about another member of the group, to which he, in turn, also reacts aggressively. The quarrel arises from scratch. Further analysis showed that Natasha does not notice how she provokes other guys: she did not even notice that the first one spoke out aggressively. The girl is not sensitive to the psychological boundaries of others, she does not notice how she hurts people. Natasha went to our training during the school year, but after a couple of months, relations in the class and in the group became more even. It turned out that the initial problem was “the tip of the iceberg”, while Natasha’s main problem was the inability to manage her own feelings, especially anger, which we worked with.
Marina, 7 years old. Parents complained about theft. Marina was seen in the school locker room when she took out small toys from the pockets of other people’s jackets. At home, parents began to discover various small toys, domino chips, candy wrappers. We recommended to Marina, first of all, individual work with a psychologist, as well as group work — training. The work at the training showed that Marina did not have an understanding of what was “mine” and what was “someone else’s”: she could easily take someone else’s place, take someone else’s thing, she regularly forgot her things at the training, often lost them. Marina does not have a sensitivity to her own and other people’s boundaries, and at the training we worked with this, drawing her attention to psychological boundaries, making them more obvious. We often asked other members how they feel when Marina violates their boundaries, and paid special attention to working with the rules of the group. Marina went to the group for a year, during which time her attitude to things (foreign and her own) changed significantly, cases of theft were no longer repeated. Of course, the changes began with the family: since Marina’s parents were actively involved in the process and the work on clearing the boundaries continued at home.